Try This, try reverse engineering marketing campaigns. I do this all of the time with television and print ads, but you could do the same with place, product and price decisions as well. Basically, I play "name that target market" whenever I see an interesting piece of marketing.

This is an excellent way for both a consumer as well as a business to analyze the type of marketing and advertising slogans used in promoting a business in any type of media setting. Discover who the target market is, evaluate the effectiveness of the marketing message, learn what goes into the buying decisions of consumers and discover at the same time what the strategic thinking involved in the mind of the marketer.

This can also be an effective way of analyzing the competition in any field. In essence a person can analyze the message going out through a website, advertising campaigns, marketing slogans, and sales messages.

Another definition of Reverse Engineering Marketing comes from a couple of French researchers who developed a methodology for product or service improvement through customer feedback.

'Reverse-engineering marketing [26]', in a way, means designing products or services based on customer feedback. But it goes way beyond the simple and straightforward analysis of customer dissatisfaction. As a matter of fact, 'Reverse-engineering marketing' actually paves the way for product and service improvement and it is not just a matter of analysing user or customer dissatisfaction. The principle guiding Reverse-engineering marketing is the following: "It must be easier to improve something that people know about, rather than ask them to specify what they ignore or even fail to understand".